Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/40



as Val was to death in all its varied forms, yet there was something about this bald announcement that seemed to catch him in the throat; it was as if an icy hand had suddenly clutched him, a hand reaching out of nowhere, a hand that could drag him from the here into the hereafter.

He had seen men die by his side; for weeks he had looked upon the face of death in the front line trenches. But death was in its proper environment there. One could die in the trenches—that’s what one was there for. It was a fitting culmination to a man’s work in the trenches.

But there was something appallingly different about a man’s being picked out of the heart of a peaceful occupation in his own store, surrounded by his own books, his own environment. And yesterday, he remembered, he had joked about death with the old man. It was not so much that the man died—we all must die—he reflected,—as it was the fact that he had died so without warning, so disconcertingly soon. To joke about death one day and to be dead the next—there was an uncanny coincidence about it that Val did not fancy, somehow.

The voice of the sergeant broke in on his meditations.

“I understand you were one of the last to see him Rh